Connective Tissue

Someone whistles
in the parking garage
and the echo
settles in the
spaces
between rows
of parked cars.

In one moment
she is
the world drowning
in rain.
In the next,
she is nothing more
than the candle
I am falling asleep by.

The words in my head
quiver with the sighs
of disappearing sparrows.

To be lonely today
is to be sandwater
in the footprints
of what it was to be lonely
a hundred years ago.

I dream of being as delicate
as the woman eating pearls
of white rice with chopsticks,
but my fork is heavy in my fist,
and I detest rice.

First I was a globe,
inspiring conversation
and the weight of open palms.

Today in the sunbeams
that melted over my hair,
I plowed twenty-four acres of restlessness
with the crescent moons of my fingernails.

Glenn Ashley Patterson is a recent graduate of Montclair State University’s English program. She currently lives and writes in New Jersey.